Hygiene: it’s not just for your body. Hygiene is also important for the health of your email marketing contact list.
If you’re a FearWorm email client, then you’ve no doubt heard me yammering on about “clean” email lists. But you may have some questions… like, what qualifies as a “clean” email list? How exactly does one clean one’s email list? Will Lemon Pledge be involved? Well, buckle up and read on, because I’m about to cover all of that and more.
Sender Reputation
Before we really get into the meat and potatoes of email list hygiene, I’d like to talk about sender reputation. A “domain sender reputation” is an overall measurement of an email domain’s trustworthiness and reliability. It reflects several factors including email engagement, spam complaint rates, bounce rates, and adherence to email best practices. Think of your sender reputation as your email “credit score”. It determines how your email domain is perceived by inbox providers such as Google and Yahoo, and how likely those providers are to send your emails to users’ inboxes rather than their spam folders. Proper email list hygiene is essential to maintaining a good sender reputation and staying out of that dreaded spam folder.
Back away from the Lemon Pledge. Your human cleaning products are no good here.
What is a “clean” email list?
A “clean” email list is one that has had all invalid, unengaged, and uninterested email contacts removed. Having a clean list ensures that you are sending emails only to valid email addresses of contacts who actually want to receive your content. What many people may not realize is that email addresses which were legitimately added to your list can become invalid over time due to a variety of reasons including user abandonment and domain expiration. Once an email address becomes invalid, it can no longer receive emails and has no place on your email list. Having a gigantic email list may seem fantastic, but if 75% of that list is invalid or doesn’t want to hear from you, then sending all of your emails to that entire list is likely doing more harm than good.
Why is it important to scrub your email list?
Reducing the size of your email list may seem counterintuitive, but cleaning (or “scrubbing”) your email list offers a plethora of benefits.
- Improved Engagement
Focusing on sending emails to only valid and engaged contacts will help to keep your open and click rates high. Keeping these numbers high improves your domain sender reputation, which will help your emails hit inboxes and stay out of spam folders.
- Higher Deliverability, Lower Bounce Rate
When an email is rejected by the inbox server and cannot be delivered to the intended recipient, this is called a “bounced” email. A bounce can occur for a variety of reasons, including an incorrect or invalid email address, the recipient’s inbox being full, server outages, poor sender reputation, or email authentication issues. Removing invalid email addresses from your list can help to minimize bounced emails, which will in turn bolster your sender reputation.
- Reduced Spam complaints
One common email marketing mistake is to continuously send emails to contacts who never click or open your emails. This is a great way to have your emails reported as spam. The more spam complaints you have, the lower your sender reputation will be. Earlier this year, Google and Yahoo actually implemented a maximum spam complaint rate of 0.3%. This means that for every 1,000 emails sent, it takes only 3 spam complaints to rise above this incredibly low threshold. Sending emails to only engaged and interested contacts helps to keep spam complaints at bay.
Spam traps can also create issues. Spam traps are fake email addresses used to identify spammers. So rude. These are sometimes email addresses that were specifically created for this purpose, or invalid email addresses that have been repurposed into spam traps. You, of course, are no spammer. But if you fail to clean your email list, it may well contain several of these traps. Repeatedly sending emails to spam trap addresses can get your domain or IP address blocklisted, which is essentially a fast pass ticket to the spam folder and a derogatory mark for your sender reputation.
- Save time, money, & energy
If nothing else, perhaps saving money can motivate you to clean your email list. Email marketing platforms typically charge for services based on the number of contacts you store in their system, or on the number of emails you are sending out every month. Simply put, if you are paying to send emails to 100,000 people every month, but only 3,000 people are regularly engaging with them, then you are likely wasting a lot of money on your email plan. Scrub that email list, get a smaller email plan, and save money. Look at you, being all fiscally responsible.
How to scrub and segment your email list
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t. I’m going to be your Yoda of email list hygiene. Become a master, you will.
- Scrubbing your list for invalid addresses
If you are a haunted attraction sending emails only seasonally, you can get away with doing a good scrub once a year right before you start sending your marketing campaigns for the fall. If you are sending email campaigns year-round, you will want to scrub your list at least once per quarter.
Start by exporting your full contact list from your email marketing platform and running it through an email list cleaning service. These services will scan for invalid email addresses and common typos (such as “gnail.com”, etc.), and remove them from your list. Once your list has been run through one of these services, you will be left with a list of only valid email addresses. Upload this shiny new clean list back into your platform and label it “Full List Scrubbed [Month] [Year]”. If creating a whole new audience or list in your platform is not an option, you can also simply tag the contacts in that list. This will now be the list that you use to send emails to. Now was that so hard?
- Segmenting Your List
Take things a step further by segmenting your list. In the “Contacts” or “Audience” section of your email marketing platform, there should be an option for “segments”. From here you can filter out contacts who have not engaged with your emails in the past year. You can also create interest-based segments by grouping contacts together based on what types of emails they have interacted with. Some examples would be Halloween, off season events, escape rooms, merch, promo deals, etc. Sending the appropriate emails to the appropriate segments will ensure that you are delivering relevant content to the contacts who want to receive it, thus improving engagement and lowering spam complaints.
In the end, keeping your email list clean isn’t just a good idea – it’s downright necessary. Think of it like brushing your teeth: sure, you can skip it, but eventually, things will get ugly, and nobody will want to be near you (or your emails). A clean list means your emails land where they’re supposed to: right in the inbox of someone who actually cares. Plus, you’ll save money, boost engagement, and avoid the dreaded spam folder like the plague. Go forth, scrub those lists, and watch your email game level up!